Meet our Grantee-Partner: Kitchen Table Literary Arts Center
Mission: Kitchen Table Literary Arts Center builds awareness, appreciation, and support for Black women and women of color writers, poets, and their work.
The Kitchen Table Literary Arts Center (KTLA) is an arts education and community service organization based in Tampa, Florida. Named after Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, which was founded by Barbara Smith in 1980 with encouragement from Audre Lorde, KTLA provides writing classes, workshops, and literary arts programming for Black and BIPOC women.
KTLA’s classes are designed to lead to the discovery or rediscovery of the work of visionary ancestors, elders, and contemporary BIPOC women writers and poets. They offer in-person and online classes and workshops for beginner, intermediate, and master level writers. Students meet weekly and work within a robust online learning platform that features multimedia, discussion boards, assignments, and critiques. For the Protest Poetry and other classes, the capstone project asks students to write and perform an original poem during an online showcase that is open to the public.
Through a partnership with the University of South Florida, KTLA has led workshops that pair the works of a contemporary poet with an elder or ancestor poet, including one on Morgan Parker and Audre Lorde. Additional workshops include poetry forms, protest poetry, anti-racism, and how to submit poetry for publication.
“Shiny Things” attendee listening to a poem at the Arts Warehouse in Delray Beach, Florida.
KTLA applied their $10,000 Poetry Programs, Partnerships, and Innovation grant toward their spring 2023 poetry programming. Titled "A Voice, A Light: Poetry Month and Beyond,” this multi-month celebration of poetry included protest poetry classes, workshops, and a reciprocal ekphrastic art project pairing poets with visual artists to create original pieces that respond to each other’s work. The initiative culminated in “Shiny Things,” an event at the Arts Warehouse in Delray Beach, Florida. This showcase of KTLA artists’s work included a poem hanging from a birch branch, a poem presented on a ten-foot scroll, audio poems, and more.
Kitchen Table continues to find new ways to broaden audiences for poetry and increase the exposure of the writers it serves, including collaborations with museums, foster homes, alternative education spaces, and other local and international grassroots arts organizations. Kitchen Table leadership and students have found that pairing poetry with different art disciplines has deepened the connection between expectations of what literary art is and what it can be.